DNS

We have our own domain mdanalysis.org (registered with GoDaddy; @orbeckst is responsible for paying and administrating the domain). We set up a custom domain with GitHub pages so that our website is hosted as GH pages but appears under our domain, specifically as https://www.mdanalysis.org and https://mdanalysis.org. We use CloudFlare to secure the website and to improve performance (@orbeckst registered the account).

Security on CloudFlare

The nameservers are under Cloudflare's control (since 2017-09-28) so that we get a free SSL certificate and can have website and docs appear under SSL, i.e., https://mdanalysis.org (following the instructions from @gsempe: Build a fast, secured and free static site in less than 3 hours). DNSSEC was also enabled (by following the Cloudflare instructions for How to add a DS record to GoDaddy).

SSL is not enforced (and in fact, the previously established subdomain forwarding only works unecrypted at the moment).

There are other implications due to using CloudFlare: CloudFlare acts as reverse proxy and all traffic to our sites is routed through their network (which likely screws up analytics unless one restores original visitor IPs). It provides caching and even static cache pages when the downstream resources are not accessible. It also provides some firewalling and protection against DDoS attacks (although this is not really our concern because we do not host any of our servers ourselves).

Repository urls

This has the additional effect that GH pages in repositories under MDAnalysis will also show up under our domain, for instance http://www.mdanalysis.org/mdanalysis/packages/doc/html is the developer documentation. Similarly, any tool that has its own repo (such as RotamerConvolveMD) can also have it's own docs such as http://www.mdanalysis.org/RotamerConvolveMD (one just has to craft the gh-pages branch carefully so that the index.html file appears at the top of the repo).

Subdomains

We can use Cloudlflare Pagerules redirecting to forward a subdomain to a specific directory. For example, https://docs.mdanalysis.org forwards to https://www.mdanalysis.org/docs.

However, on the free plan we only have 3 free rules available. Only t

Existing subdomain forwards

subdomain	url	target	target url	real host
docs	https://docs.mdanalysis.org	release docs	https://www.mdanalysis.org/docs/	GitHub (CloudFlare PageRule)
workshop	https://workshop.mdanalysis.org	Workshop/Hackathon 2018	https://www.mdanalysis.org/WorkshopHackathon2018/	GitHub (CloudFlare page rule)
www	https://www.mdanalysis.org	home page	https://mdanalysis.github.io	GitHub (CNAME)

| https://mdanalysis.org | home page | `https://mdanalysis.github.io` | GitHub (CloudFlare page rule)

And of course, https://mdanalysis.org and https://www.mdanalysis.org are the MDAnalysis GitHub-Pages.